I am Keren Brown(note: Keren with 2 E's), a food obsessed, recipe crazed foodie!
I am dedicated to getting Seattle the foodie recognition it deserves.Hey! Seattle should be in every issue of Food and Wine. Read about Seattle events,
try my recipes or just immerse yourself in the food obsession.
Check out my other blog in the Seattle PI http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/franticfoodie/

Friday, May 8, 2009

Win Tickets to Celebrity Food Event

Want to win tickets? Keep Reading.

The Celebrity Chef Tour benefiting the James Beard Foundation is coming to Seattle on May 14th at the Columbia Tower Club.

The Celebrity chef tour recreates the James beard experience with culinary artists from all over the U.S. The event will include a reception and multi-course dining experience complete with premium wine pairings. The host of the dinner is Chef James Hassell and Seattle's own Ethan Stowell who will be cooking up a unique menu. Ethan Stowell owns Anchovies and Olives, How to Cook a Wolf and Tavolata just to name a few.

From Press Release:As such, the Celebrity Chef Tour dinner at the Columbia Tower Club on May 14th promises to delight the palates of the most discriminating epicureans. Chefs Ethan and James will begin the evening with an elegant reception, featuring unique hors d'oeuvre creations served with a complementary wine selection. An innovative, one-of-a-kind dinner will follow, throughout which the chefs will engage the audience and share their insights in an intimate and exclusive setting, as guests enjoy several meticulously crafted courses paired with an assortment of carefully selected wines.

Tickets are $175 (plus state sales tax).For more information and topurchase tickets, please contact Jeff Black at 720-201-1853 or jeff@innercirclecompanies.com.

Okay Guys..I have two tickets. Who wants them? Tell me about your most embarrassing kitchen moment. I just want to laugh a little. Leave a comment and be sure to check back to see if you won. I will choose the winner on Monday ,the 11th at midnight by random number.Good LuckKeren

14 comments:

Ok, here it goes, Keren... I was making a very "easy" pasta sauce (mushrooms, cream, parsely and parmesano, basically) as the whole family was going to get together and have dinner on the night of my parents' 28th anniversary. Since there were around 20 guests and I was used to cooking for just a handful of people, I was a little nervous, especially when the cream wasn't thickening as I wanted it to, and everyone was starving! So I decided to add some flour, without realizing that I was adding from my mom's super fine sugar container, with which she decorates her desserts... When I tried the sauce it was already too late: it was horribly sweet! I had my brother run to the supermarket and buy a pasta sauce. My family still makes fun of my "sweet pasta", and I can still recall the terrible flavor of the sugary mushrooms cream, hehe.

I'm not sure about the most embarrassing moment but I can tell you that 2 weeks ago I was making dinner and prepared a soy, garlic, fish sauce marinade in a drinking glass. While I was in the throws of cooking, I grabbed the glass and took a big swig of it thinking I was grabbing my diet coke. All I can recall is a whole bunch of $!?#$%! words coming out of my mouth.

Many years ago I thought I'd impress my girlfriend's parents by making them dinner the very first time we met. I went with Chicken Parmigiana, because it's a fairly easy dish that most people like and usually find somewhat impressive. This time, however, I was out of olive oil, so I used peanut oil instead. Because oil is oil, right? Not exactly, ESPECIALLY when your girlfriend's mother is deadly allergic to peanuts and goes into anaphylaxis within minutes of taking her first bite. A call to 911, a shot from her epi-pen, and about four hours later, we concluded our introductory dinner - at Jack in the Box.

Also, though it's quite the opposite of embarrassing, the 14th just so happens to be my 5th wedding anniversary as well. And yes, it's the same girl whose mother I tried to off all those years ago.

oh I've got a good one for you. When I was younger, about 20 years old, I had just moved in with someone. Our jobs were to clean and maintain a condo building as assistant managers, and our apartment was on the first floor. Being from Denver and a big fan of the yearly Native American Pow-wows, I thought I'd try making "Navajo Fry Bread" by myself for the first time. I made something resembling funnel cake batter, and started heating a frying pan full of oil. Well, I had no idea what the smoke point of vegetable oil was. I didn't even realize it was way too hot until teh smoke alarm went off. The thing that made it so humiliating? They'd wired the smoke alarm incorrectly when they made the apartment. The entire building was under alarm and evacuated, the firemen came, and the smoke was blown out with giant fans through the windows for about an hour. I wanted to seriously crawl under a rock. I learned how to research before I try a new technique... But I never really learned how to make Navajo Fry Bread.

First of all, Jay's entry is awesome! Those disastrous memories can be some of the best. My husband and I went bike riding for our first date and I crashed horribly, rolling/skidding down a hill passing a car that was going 25mph and breaking my arm.

Anyway, for my cooking story, I have a lot, but one of the best was cooking a creole Thanksgiving dinner with my friend for her family including her very critical in laws. We decided on blackened salmon for the main dish and thought the recipe calling for 1 lb of butter to fry it in must be mistaken, but we had the butter on hand just in case. We were using a large, shallow, rectangular griddle pan on the stove and quickly realized that we would need all the butter. We added it and it melted right away frying the salmon with a nice black crust. The problem came when I flipped the salmon and sent a wave of butter over the edge and into the burner. Flames suddenly shot to the ceiling and we just sort of stood there in awe. Her father in law turned to her husband (they could see us from the living room) and said "they set your kitchen on fire." Her husband ran in and beat the flames out for us. Fortunately the fish tasted amazing and no real damage was done.

Hi! Not sure if any of you have ever tried ‘Dulce de leche’ but in some countries in South America and the Caribbean it is a fairly common dessert, either by itself or mixed with something else. Well, one day, since I love it so much and I was feeling a little homesick, I decided to make my own. The recipe that I was following said that the condensed milk was to be cooked in the oven in the double boiler system (the can submerged in boiling water) for about an hour. But I was feeling a little adventurous and decided to cut the cooking time by half by using the pressure cooker I had recently bought. I filled the pressure cooker with water, put the sweet condensed milk in it, closed it, turn on the stove to high and set the timer to 35 minutes… I went to my room and sat down to check my email to keep me busy while I waited for the delicious dulce de leche to be ready. I wasn’t hearing the pressure cooker hissing, as it should be, but maybe it was taking a longer time than usual because of the amount of water I had put in it. So I thought everything seemed to be going great until… BAM!!! I heard this huge explosion. I felt shivers running down my spine because the sound had come from my kitchen. When I got there, still catching my breath, I saw that the dulce de leche was ready, and its consistency and color seemed juts right: of a burnt brownish color, muddy and thick… But it was ALL OVER the kitchen cabinets, walls, windows, appliances, floor, and roof. The pressure cooker had exploded because, I suppose, the cap was blocked and was not letting any pressure out. I did the only thing I could do in that situation: I grabbed a spoon and a small ladder and ate the dulce de leche right from the roof, the walls, and the cabinets until I felt I had had enough. Truth is that my messy kitchen made it feel just like home…

My boyfriend’s birthday is on Wednesday, May 13th, and since he loves food, this seems like a great way to do something he loves… without having to ask him to help me clean the mess afterwards.

In college a friend (who was a diet freak) told me that you could sub applesauce for butter in recipes. So I thought this would be a great idea, lets take the fat out of cookies! Bring out the pizza stone (because everything cooks better on stoneware!) and whip up some batter for oatmeal chocolate chip!

Turns out, the cookies aren't cookies without butter to help them stay together and harden. There was a nice, huge mess of soggy sugary liquidy dough all over my boyfriend's oven.

oh it's a toss up - but both with gummy results. First, there was the coconut cake where the ingredients were added out of order, and the gluten was activated. Learned my lesson in separating wet and dry ingredients when is says so! More humorous was the lovely brunch where the cornstarch was mistaken for powdered surgar. Not the best topping for French toast. My friends were too polite to say anything at first and just tried to cover it with maple syrup. Since then I have redeemed myself, and people will still come to eat.

Let's see... this is more obnoxious than anything. I was making a chicken dish that involved baking in a glass pyrex. The recipe had me add wine to the pan, once the meat was done cooking. I opened the oven and poured in a cup of red wine and the pyrex dish shattered all over the oven!! Smoke, wine, glass shards and all! I attempted to salvage the meal I had slaved over for the last hour and a half, but I was too annoyed. Word to the wise, don't put cool liquid in a hot Pyrex!!

Wow, some great stories in here...Becky I remember your Pyrex explosion! Wow there are so many kitchen mishaps in my history, cuts, burns, slips, drops, etc... it's hard to decide on one to share.

Here's one that has always stuck out in my mind. I was vacationing with some friends in Florida, and since we were given free lodging at my friend's aunt's house, I decided I would make a nice dinner in for everyone: Homemade Gnocchi with Sun-dried tomato cream sauce and pesto. (Let me know if you want the recipe.) The short of it is as a Northern boy in a Southern kitchen you might not notice the difference between a bowl of uncooked grits and grated parmesean cheese-- so before i realized what bowl I had grabbed out of the fridge it was too late. Let's just say the sauce was a little bit thicker than it should have been. I promptly ordered pizza and was made fun of for the rest of the evening, at least the wine helped dull the embarrassment.

I had just moved into my new queen anne apartment, i call this my cooking in your 20's moment. I was happily mashing potatoies, sauteeing bok choy, about to put my pork chops in the oven to broil. Turned on the broiler to get it going, something started to smell smokey, well ok its a new apartment, new oven, something is probably dried on. Then the oven started to smoke and flames entrenching the stove. I then found out the "storage" drawer on my gas oven was the broiler. I had caught oven mits on fire. Yup, it is feasible. Of course the smoke detector was going off.... not exactly my best cooking moment ever.

I am not easily embarassed, but one of my most serendipitious cooking moments was when I accidentally doubled the flour in a cake recipe, and ended up with yummy tea cakes. That's what I get for blind baking.